Humanity and climate change - Essay Example

This paper provides evidence that human activities caused climate change. The Human Face behind Climate Change Numerous scholars and scientists agree that human activities have been the predominant root of global warming. Pollution has particularly raised global temperature levels which, in turn, affect numerous life forms. Kluger synthesizes reports that argue that global warming and climate change are real phenomena and that they are mainly the effects of prodigious human emissions. Extraordinary amounts of CO2 released into the air from people’s industries and automobiles have created the problem of global warming, which produce climate changes (Kluger).

Glaciologist Rignot examines data from Canadian and European satellites and stipulates that Greenland ice is melting twice as fast than before, with 53 cu. mi. of water melting to the sea in 2005, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996 (Kluger). A cubic mile of water is around five times the amount that Los Angeles consumers every year (Kluger). In addition, the ocean water level is also rapidly rising and caused flooding in low-coastal areas, such as Bangladesh (Kluger). Schnoor provides additional proof that that increases in greenhouse gases or GHGs, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and others, in the atmosphere have produced global warming.

NASA also concurs that these gases blankets the atmosphere and trap heat from escaping the Earth’s atmosphere. Schnoor emphasizes that burning fossil fuels, flooded agriculture, animal husbandry, and coal mining principally released higher carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) levels, leaked methane (CH4), and resulted to the denitrification of nitrogen fertilizers, which raised nitrous oxide (N2O) levels in the atmosphere. He stresses that CO2 is accountable for more than half of the greenhouse effect, and it is rising exponentially at ?0.4% per year (1106).

He states that each time a person uses 10 gallons for their car; he/she releases 190 lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere (1106). Schnoor depicts that each person in the United States releases “6 metric tons of carbon (22 metric tons of CO2) into the atmosphere each year” (1106). The total emissions from global anthropogenic activities are “more than 6–7 billion metric tons of carbon per year, and approximately half of that are accumulating in the atmosphere” (Schnoor 1106). Studies showed that the rising global atmospheric CO2 concentrations mostly came from humans because of three kinds of evidence.

First, the increase in CO2 concentrations only began at the end of the 18th century, the time of the industrial revolution (Schnoor 1106). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the climate change in 2001 asserts that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from 280 ppm (parts per million) in 1750 to 367 ppm in 1999 (31% increase)” (Khandekar, Murty, and Chittibabu 1563). The IPCC describes also the huge increase in other greenhouse gases (GHG) such as, methane and nitrous oxide, which heightened by 145% and 15%, respectively, in the last 250 years, where the Industrial Age coincided with these extraordinary high levels of greenhouse gases